I, too think the quilting is lovely. Very complimentary and not distracting. Sometimes machine quilting gets too busy, in my opinion and this one is not at all.
I think, as others have said here, your hand quilting experience is making you too critical.
If I were to receive this as a gift I would probably cry!!
From JOY, that is!!
As the lady at JoAnn's said, the other day when I was purchasing fabric for my new quilt..."You must love someone VERY much to be giving this away"!!!

My 2 cents worth: it's quite lovely. I have really bad hands, so hand quilting would never be an option for me. (not enough drugs in the world, ha!) So I machine quilt if the piece is small enough, but the larger ones I send to the LA. Quilting is art, and quilters are artists. Some artists use brushes, some use fingers. Some quilters hand-quilt, some quilters machine quilt. All use their love. And that's what matters.

Well said. I have bad arthritis in my thumbs and index fingers so hand sewing is out of the question too. I relay on the LAQ for the big quilts. So far I can quilt on the machine as long as I take several Tylenol for arthritis!

Sorry you had this experience. The quilt really does look beautiful. I take all my show quilts to my LAer and she always does them justice and then some! She asks me what I want and I always tell her she's the expert! Never been disapointed.

Hi Roselady...yes this has happened to me...it was a beautiful pieced and appliqued quilt and probably very difficult to quilt..so much stopping and starting....But the main thing was she didn't change the color of the thread and so very light thread showed up inthe dark borders and it wasn't a good quilting job...I was almost in tears ...all that work ....I'm sorry about your quilt. I guess it does happen..we need to be more careful in who we choose....Hugs SG